The Dice Is The God!

Einstein once famously said that God doesn't play dice with us.  This was a reaction to Quantum Mechanics which considers matter as waves of probability.  Einstein's world was one of absolute order and predictability.  Most humans know from firsthand experience that the world, as we experience it, is not really so.

These days I spend some time each day playing Sudoku.  When playing at the evil level, I am seldom able to solve the puzzle without making a few, sometimes upto half a dozen guesses.  I find that each game seems to have a probability tag attached to it, though it is mostly binary, i.e., 0 or 1.  So when the tag is one, nearly all my guesses turn out to be correct.  When it is 0, nearly all guesses go wrong.  Only in an insignificant number of games do I find some going wrong and the others correct.  Each game is either like a good day when everything seems to be going your way or like a bad one where everything is going against you.

Each human life, too, seems to be marked with a probability tag.  The value on the tag is determined by the country, the period as also the family in which you are born.  Yes, each place has a tag and each time period has one too.

This probability is what we adore and what we fear.  It is this probability that we pray to be raised in our favour when we worship whichever God we believe in.  In a sense this probability is the God!

And this is why in societies that manage to reduce inequalities and insecurities to the bare minimum, people tend towards atheism.  There is no dice to worship, except, perhaps the genes that determine the quality of your existence.  In India we do consider parents equivalent to deities - मात्रृ देवो भव, पित्रृ देवो भव.

It seems that here is a hierarchy of probability tags too.  I may be born with a tag of below 50%.  But I may go to a place at a time that have high value tags attached to them.  These tags, though subordinate to my life tag, may cause a higher overall value attaching to my existence in that place in that period.  If the dice is the God, this could be considered to be polytheism.

To be sure favorable and unfavorable have meaning only for the sentient beings.  So essentially my surmise is that each frame of reference (place and time) and each consciousness therein has a probability value that has a definite bias peculiar to it.  The favorable and unfavorable occurrences are seldom equal over the entire lifetime, but have a definite skew one way or the other.

If you subscribe to this conjecture, there is a beautiful corollary.  After all, it is just a game, a game of dice, that we are playing even if it seems to be going decisively against one.

De and Re - monetization

I happened to be watching news when PM appeared and made the demonetization announcement.  I thought this was going to be the precursor to implementing the much debated Banking Transaction Tax.  I was thrilled.  Then came the announcement that new series of notes of Rs.500 and Rs.2000 were to be introduced instead.  The thrill was gone.

The dual steps only introduce an asymmetry.  Those who had stashed currency up to the demonetization date were struck a blow while retaining the opportunity for new aspiring corrupts or those who held their assets in other forms or abroad.  This is exactly what the then RBI Governor had accused the then PM, Morarji Desai, of doing when he had demonetized high value currency notes in 1978. Read this article.

All the trouble that the public is going through would still have been worth it, had the re-monetization not been done and the public encouraged to use electronic payments for most payments.

Again, things have changed since the demonetization done by Morarji Desai.  Now it is only petty and middling black money holders who keep their ill-gotten wealth in cash.  The more sophisticated ones build protfolios comprising of benami accounts, real estate, gold, diamond and what have you.  These petty and meddling people are the ones who will bear the brunt of this exercise and they don't deserve any sympathy just for being small.  The real big players have much better tools these days.  We now live in an era where powerful, even though misguided, financial engineering could shake the world economy in the 2008 meltdown. The same engineering tools enable huge sums of money to be stashed abroad.  Then it is made to visit India as FII for growing itself and then goes back.  While visiting India it is also, at times, converted into cash for funding elections or other political activities.  Though, I must confess, I still don't fully understand how all this is done.  Well, this is why investment bankers are paid so well unlike ordinary bankers like me.

There is a suspicion that this exercise has been so timed as to kill this visiting black money that had already been converted into cash for funding the impending state elections.  Simultaneously it also leads to a suspicion that those who were not in too much of a hurry will benefit from the fact that the highest available denomination has now been doubled.

It makes me happy if some of the parties have lost sizeable election funds and I do hope that they will get even with the current ruling party if and when their turn comes.

As regards putting a brake on fake notes, it will only be for such period as it will take the fraudsters to learn to forge the new series.  Further, I doubt if the current action will be able to purge the existing fake notes in circulation.  This would have been possible if all cash counters were equipped with sophisticated currency checking and counting machines, which they are not.  The sudden jump in work pressure too will come in the way of detection of forged notes.  Thus a good amount of forged currency is very likely to get coverted into genuine currency.  Discontinuation of all denominations beyond INR 50 is the only way to save the economy from the forgers who are said to have the backing of a hostile nation.

Before I close, I wish to express my solidarity with those housewives who have been setting aside a part of household expense money and are now forced to disclose it.  In some cases it is beyond the INR 2.5 lakh limit for deposit into account, and the husbands are truly furious.  Bank employees who will be toiling like mules for quite a few days have my fullest sympathy.  The re-issue of high denomination notes makes me unsure of any noble motives behind the current strike.  Correct me if I am wrong.

Air Pollution And The Pond Of Milk

There is a Akbar-Birbal story in which the Emperor gets a huge pond constructed and then orders each citizen to pour a potful of milk in the pond during the night so that it gets full of milk by next morning.  In the morning the pond is found full of water.  Birbal explains that each subject thought that all the others will be obediently pouring milk and a potful of water from him will make little difference! As we shall see, today this story has been made to stand on its head.

Air pollution in our cities and villages remains hopelessly high perenially.  I feel the main reason is burning of garbage in the cities and of stalks of harvested crops in the villages.  Swachchh Bharat notwithstanding, all the blah-blah is about not littering and not about the final disposal of all kinds of waste.  Yet, most of the time there are a few islands of greenery in each city where one can breathe comparatively easily.  Lohia park in Lucknow is one such spot in my city.  However since past couple of days, post Dipawali, the air in the park is drenched in the smell of firework and garbage fumes.  And, you will agree, that jogging with a mask will not only be difficult but ridiculous too.  No need to highlight how bad the air elsewhere is.

A news channel illustrated the air quality post Dipawali by telling us that it is like a room filled with the smoke from 465 cigarettes!  Smokers are now countering the propaganda against smoking by pointing out how much worse can it be if you make it 475 instead of 465?  Just a rise of little over 2%!  And this 2% is pleasurable unlike the remaining 98 percent.  Similarly staunch proponents of muscular Hinduism point out that burning of crackers hardly adds significantly to the already murderous levels of pollution.

If our story were to be retold in today's terms, it would again be a pond full of water, but now for a different reason.  Now everyone thinks that all the others will be pouring water only and a potful of milk from him will make little difference.  If everyone is polluting to his heart's content, how do my cigarettes or crackers make a difference.

So dear readers, here is my Vetaal prashn!  I gave up smoking 11 years ago.  Is the time ripe to resume?

Festivals: Floodgates To Goodwishes!

If there are so many people in a gathering and everyone shakes everyone else's hands, how many handshakes are there in all?  Thus goes the famous riddle that most of us have come across when learning the Arithmetic Series.  A good thing about handshakes is that whether you take the lead and shake the other person's hands or the other seizes the lead, once the hands are shaken you are done.  Goodwishes are more demanding.  When one person has taken the lead, the other must reciprocate.  Thus, the answer to the riddle mentioned in the beginning, would have to be doubled if it was goodwishes instead of handshakes!

Again, while while you can shake hands only with an individual, you can greet people individually, or in groups - small and large, regional and national, local and global, friends and colleagues, family and acquaintances et al.  Of course any individual is quite likely to figure in more than one of your groups and so each one gets greeted multiple times by the same individual and feels obliged to respond as many times.  Add to this the multiplicity of channels, greeting in person, greeting through a voice call, greetings through SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google+ and what have you.  The multiplication factor for the answer to the original riddle goes up by a few orders of magnitude! Luckily cards are going out of vogue and that means one fewer channel.

If you are already nodding your head in agreement, it shows that you have experienced firsthand the deluge caused by festivals that open the floodgates for pent up goodwishes.  If the goodwishes were to materialize, the world would be instantly turned into something vastly superior to heavens of our imagination.  But instead what happens is this.  Subscriptions to special rate SMS packs are suspended, voice calls get dropped, the broadband bandwidth gets choked and photos, animations, and videos clog the storage space on your electronic communication device.

There does exist a solution to this overload.  It is inspired by banks who have hugely simplified interbank transactions by promoting credit push in place of debit pull.  The proposed solution will replace push with pull instead.  This would drastically reduce the number of greetings by limiting it to just the number of persons who wish to greet each other.  And it is simple!  Let there be a greetings registry.  All greeters must register here.  Now if one wishes to greet others on a particular occasion, he can put his greeting on the site.  The site will not push it to anyone.  Instead whoever so wants, will have to pull it.  So I log into the registry, and ask for Dipawali greeting from my friend X.  If he has posted a greeting, the greeting is personalized with my registered name and shown to me.  Those who post greetings can also be given the facility of a associating a negative list (to deny greetings to a few chosen people) or a positive list (if the greeting is meant only for a single persons or a few persons.)

One problem with this suggestion is that bosses, wives, and OGFs (Opposite Gender Friends) may feel offended if the greeting addresses them with just their registered names unqualified by any superlatives.  Hopefully they can take it in their stride.

And so, dear readers, pending creation of this registry, I dedicate this post to each one of you and wish you a very Happy Dipawali and a New Year filled with joy, prosperity and good health.  (This is in addition to my SMS, Whatsapp, FB and Google+ greetings!)  The fact that you have read this post is reciprocation enough.

Yippee! I Got Myself A Dumb Phone!!

I love smartphones. Who won't love something that has both brains and beauty and is slim to boot. Like all beautiful things, smartphones too have high maintenance requirements. And. like all slim things, smartphones have high metabolism.  They consume lots of expensive data just to keep themselves updated.  And their zero tolerance for any bulge means either frequent access to the mains or providing a power bank to keep them company.  The bulky powerbank accentuates their slim looks by juxtaposition.

Further like all beautiful things, smartphones are quite fragile.  You drop your smartphone and, more likely than not, a load drops off your pocket for restoration of its beauty, if it is still possible.  They also cause envy and hence are very prone to loss.  Then some smartphones are so classy that they refuse to take more than one SIM.  And for most of us in India, one SIM is just not enough.

 This is the familiar backdrop against which I decided to buy a dumb phone which can perform the basic functions without frequent charging and can also provide peace of mind because of lower chances of loss and low cost of replacement.

So I got myself a Nokia 130 DS.  DS is just double SIM.  It is an absolutely basic phone with usual frills - FM radio, MP3 player, torch, clock, calculator, calendar et al.  It can also take a 32GB SD card.  Accessing this card through your PC is pretty straightforward and that turns it into a storage device too.  It weighs very little, is small enough to be hidden in an adult sized palm and the battery lasts about a week with normal use!  The only wireless connectivity option it provides is Bluetooth for connecting to headphones / speakers.  No mobile data or Wifi and, hence, no Internet.  The price is sub 2K.

With this new addition to my gadstock (on the lines of livestock and deadstock,)  I now use my smartphone for data based applications and the dumb one for conventional uses within its capabilities.  This, unfortunately, also means having two numbers and discouraging your contacts from using the data number for voice calls.  But, then, these days clever apps make voice too ride on data. Of course, you can always tote both the phones.  Then there is the question of your tablet and your laptop, not to speak of non-portable devices.  But let us not complicate issues by taking that up now.

PS: My smartphone has a Power Saving Mode and an Ultra Power Saving mode. The first makes it a little less intelligent and diligent and the other takes it pretty close to a dumb phone!

I Am In Lucknow And The Smile Is Waning

I live in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh (UP) state in India.  This historical city is famous for its Chikankari (embroidery handwork), monuments from the British era and the era of Nawabs, fine cuisine and superb etiquette.  All these, especially the last two, are believed to be capable of making the face of any visitor light up with joy: And hence the adage "मुस्कुराइए कि आप लखनऊ में हैं!"  It translates to "Now that you are in Lucknow, smile!"

While the city takes pains to keep the ageing monuments in good repairs, little is being done to prevent erosion of its fine etiquettes and the accompanying moral fabric.  Things seem to have gone so far that business entities, especially those of online variety, are reluctant to do business with the residents and accord to them common courtesies accorded to a group of good customers.  I will give some examples from my own experience that bear this out.

I am an Airtel customer and my relationship with them is strong in so much as I subscribe to all their services, DTH, Broadband and LL as well as a mobile connection.  And so their response came as a shock to me when I contacted their customer care for activating international roaming (IR) on my phone.  They said, quite categorically, that this service is not provided to customers in UP (East) circle!  It is interesting to note that those in the UP (West) circle do not face this ignominy!

Then, again, while enquiring with airlines operating on the Delhi-Lucknow sector, I found out that passengers coming in to Delhi from an international sector and proposing to travel on the D-L domestic sector were not allowed any additional baggage allowance.  Though, such additional allowance was given by some airlines on such sectors as Delhi-Raipur!  Yet another case of discrimination!

The latest affront comes from Amazon (India.)  I used their app to order a Moto g plus phone with protective cover and screen guard.  The latter two, of course, are low value items while the phone is priced at INR 15K.  While the latter articles were okayed in my order, a message said that the first item could not be shipped to my PIN code.  I tried other PIN codes in Lucknow and even in Faizabad but in vain.  Correspndence with their customer care suggests that Amazon has stopped delivering high value merchandise in whole of eastern UP!  Amazon being the exclusive dealer for this phone I now have to give up my plan to purchase this phone!

I feel deeply hurt by these incidents and am wondering why are commercial entities are viewing the residents of this state as such unreliable and irresponsible louts?  I would also like to check with our state government and political leaders if they have any plans to check this loss of face and the waning smile.

The Outcry Of A Cattle Class Denizen

There was a big hue and cry when Mr. Shashi Tharoor used the term Cattle Class for the economy class in aircrafts.  However we should be grateful to him for bringing out the inhuman way in which passengers are packed like sardines in a merciless quest to maximize earnings.  There seems to be a competition amongst airlines who try to outdo each other in shaving centimetres off the seats in x and y directions: Mercifully dimension z remains unaffected.

Recently I had an occasion to travel in the economy class on an Air Berlin flight.  Most passengers were Europeans, tall and well built.  I could imagine their plight as the seats were not too comfortable even for me, a person of average Indian build.  As boarding progressed, a large obese man came in, looked at his seat and said aloud in mock despair, “Oh my God, the seats are so small!”  Everybody joined him in a hearty laugh.

This aircraft appeared to have shrunk the tiny spaces near toilet and pantry blocks too.  These are the spaces where passengers spend some time standing during long haul flights.  I am sure that majority of the passengers must have felt highly claustrophobic.

What adds to the woe of a typical passenger is the insistence of the passenger in front of him on going into a recline at the first available opportunity after the take off.  This has a domino effect until and unless a considerate passenger decides against succumbing to the temptation on account of a consideration to the fellow passenger behind him.  Then again, as most peoples’ knees are pressing against the back of the seat in front, a restless passenger who turns and twists in his seat passes on the convulsions to the one behind him as also one in front of him.  This too may lead to a chain reaction.  Just as we hear of road rage, there are reports of CC (Cattle Class) rage in the economy cabins.

What comes as a surprise is that most airlines complain of losses despite these stringent millimetre cutting measures.  Air Berlin is no different.  They are talking of shrinking their fleet and cost cutting measures.  Though, one suspects that what they mean is shrinking of economy class seats and micrometre cutting measures.

The situation is so bad that in my opinion we, the denizens of economy class, must take the issue to the International Human Rights Commission.  Agree?

PS: Blessed are those magnanimous passengers who resist the temptation to recline their seat back and also sit still in their chairs out of sheer compassion for fellow sufferers.